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Fiutak: Hog Tied
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Before the season started, it wasn't crazy to suggest that Arkansas deserved to be in the discussion of national title contenders. At the very least the Hogs were on the short list of “it” teams that needed to be paid attention to every Saturday. However, after starting out 1-3 with a loss to a Sun Belt team (ULM), a Big East team at home (Rutgers) and a quit job, to paraphrase quarterback Tyler Wilson, in an embarrassing home blowout to Alabama, bowl eligibility isn't even a sure thing.
With a team supposedly loaded with talent, and a good schedule with home games against Alabama and LSU, the expectations were set reasonably high for John L. Smith when he took over the Arkansas head coaching job. No one expected him to be a superstar, but all the pieces were in place to succeeed and now, barring a major miracle and an incredible run over the next two months, the program will be looking for a new head coach.
It hasn't worked out with Smith, and very soon Arkansas will have one of the biggest job openings in all of football. Fortunately, I have the perfect guy who’ll not only make the program a winner again; he’ll instantly put it on a national title track.
Yes, there’s one coach who’ll be the right fit for the right program at the right time. He has a proven track record of making teams special in a heartbeat, and he has the chops to punch his weight with any coach in a division that currently employs three head men with national championship rings.
Arkansas, if you want to win again right now, your new head coach … is Bobby Petrino.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I know, but if Michael Vick can be a starting NFL quarterback, and John Calipari can be a national championship head coach, and Fred Willard can continue to be an advertising pitchman, then certainly there’s a place for a guy who took both Louisville and Arkansas to the doorstep of a national title in just four seasons.
Petrino might be a punchline in the NFL, and he might have a horrible reputation for a variety of reasons, but he’s also a whale of a college football head coach going 41-9 at Louisville and 21-5 in his last two seasons at Arkansas; he’s going be a winner no matter where he lands. Someone is going to hire Petrino, and Arkansas, it might as well be you.
It’s okay to say you screwed this one up.
No matter how it was wrapped up and presented, Petrino got fired because it didn’t really seem right that he lied to his boss about canoodling with a hot blonde not named Mrs. Petrino. That’s it, and if every college football head coach was canned for being less than truthful to the higher-ups and/or for having an “inappropriate relationship,” the sidelines would be loaded with guys who look like Jerry Sandusky and coach like Gerry Faust. It was a silly controversy at the time, and now it looks even more ridiculous six months later.
Did Petrino break any laws? No.
Did he get charged with any crimes? No.
Did he get fired for breaking or even bending any NCAA rules? Nope.
The school tried to show justifiable cause by pretending to be mad that Petrino hired his mid-life crisis - former Arkansas volleyball player Jessica Dorrell - for a job, making it seem like he was giving her a special favors and preferential treatment. Did he do that? Yeah, and there’s a word for it … NETWORKING.
There are a variety of reasons people get hired. How many people get jobs because they know the guy whose uncle plays golf with the head of the widgets division? How many former assistants and players get jobs doing something somewhere because a head coach put in a call of recommendation? It’s not like Petrino appointed Dorell to become the Deputy Director of Norad; she was hired to be the student-athlete development coordinator – she was going to make arrangements for recruiting visits.
The school and athletic director Jeff Long wanted to save face with the Penn State nightmare in full blow up mode, and at the time it seemed like the prudent and safe move. There wasn’t much blowback from the Arkansas faithful – again, remember the mood everyone was in last spring when it came to the role of athletic departments in major universities – and the thought was the John L. Smith could step into a turn-key situation and produce a winner.
And now Arkansas is probably going to need to find a head coach.
Like there is every year, 20 to 30 FBS coaching jobs will become available for one reason or another, and someone will want Petrino because college football head coaches who are this good are a rare commodity. Yeah, it’s okay to have a head coach who does nothing but win, and no available option will be better at doing that.
Arkansas can either go through an exhaustive search and interview process only to roll the dice hoping for a winner, or it can simply admit that having a good football program that makes a ton of money – Arkansas was recently ranked eighth on the Forbes list of most valuable college football programs - and wins lots and lots of games is the whole point of having a big-time athletic department in the first place.
Arkansas wants to matter again in the SEC West, Petrino is available, and if these two got back together, everything in the recent past would be quickly forgotten in our 14-second attention span world. People are actually starting to feel bad for Penn State – there’s an off chance that with the right PR, Petrino could be a sympathetic changed-man-who-saw-error-of-ways figure.
Of course, this will never happen and both Arkansas and Petrino will move on.
And the winner of the LSU-Alabama game on November 3rd will probably go on to win the national title.
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Fiutak: The
right coach for Arkansas is ... ?
- Cirminiello: The new &
improved Pac-12
-
Zemek: New struggles for new QBs
-
Harrison: Iowa at a crossroads
-
Johnson: Should Oregon leapfrog LSU in the polls?
-
Doan: Oh yes, Notre Dame is back